Placebos: Pretty Good for Depression

For patients with mild depression, a couple popular antidepressants don’t work any better than placebos, according to a study in this week’s JAMA that mined data from previously published studies. Earlier analyses have come to similar conclusions.

The typical conclusion from studies like these is that antidepressants don’t work for mild to moderate depression. That’s fair by the rules of randomized trials; a drug has to work better than a placebo. But the data do suggest that patients with mild depression feel better when they take antidepressants — it’s just that they also feel better when they take placebos …

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